Prevent the Screensaver from starting during a Defrag

Prevent the Screensaver from starting during a Defrag of the hard drive

Running the Hard Disk Defragmenter periodically improves the performance of your computer, and as a matter of fact, if you leave your computer running most of the time, you can set the Defragmenter to run when your not actually using your computer. See Performing an Unattended Defrag from Scheduler.

If you happen to be also using a screensaver, each time the screensaver starts it will cause the Defragmenter to start over until finally a small window comes up advising you that it cannot continue as “X” is writing to the disk.

To prevent the screensaver from interrupting the Defragmenter, we can make a small change to the Windows Registry.

1. Click Start, then Run and type in REGEDIT and click OK.
2. Now drill down to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets

1. Here you will be creating a new key called Defrag and a sub-key called Settings if they do not already exist.

If the key Defrag does not already exist:

Right click on the word “Applets” in the left Regedit window and then select “New” and then select “Key“

Name the new key Defrag.

Next, right click on the new Defrag key and select “New” and then select “Key“.

Name the new key Settings.

1. Now let’s add the appropriate values to the Settings sub-key to prevent the screensaver from running when the Defragmenter starts.

Right click on the word Settings and then select “New” and then select “String Value“.

A small window will open enabling you to name this new string value. Insert DisableScreenSaver.

Now right click on the new string value and select modify.

When the small modification window opens, it will ask you for the Value Data, insert YES

1. Now close Regedit and restart your computer in order for this change to take effect.

Now the next time your Defragmenter starts, the screensaver will automatically be disabled.